January 2020
30 movies, 2 and a half books, 2 live performances
First movie of the
year:
Search Party - On New Year’s morning, after everyone had left
and Kristen went for breakfast with her sister, I managed to make it to the
couch, turn on HBO and started watching the new Hellboy which put me right to
sleep. I then turned this movie on after waking from my nap. It was all right.
Lots of recognizable people and dumb jokes. A fine way to start the New Year!
Watched in
theaters:
I don’t get to the movies as often as I used to but still make it to a couple movies a month.
1917 - this 2019 movie wasn’t released wide until early 2020
but it’ll probably be on my top 10 at the end of the year. It's a war movie with some big moments but for the most part it is a very small, personal movie about two soldiers on a mission to deliver a message that will prevent their side from entering an ambush.
The film is shot as if it’s all done in one take and with some clever editing it works quite well. The scenes of sniper battles, crossing No Man’s
Land, a plane crash, falling into a rushing river are all tense moments and
when the camera captures it all in real time (or edited to look like real time)
it pulls you into the drama and journey.
Bad Boys for Life - I remember being underwhelmed by Bad Boys when I first saw it. I watched
it on TV as a kid and it was light on action and most of the humor was missing
from the TV edit. I watched it recently and still found it to be light on
action but it makes up for that with humor and entertaining character
interaction. What action it did have was pretty exciting and overall it's a
good feature film debut for Michael Bay.
Bad Boys 2 has too
much of everything and it’s spectacular nonsense. This holds a special place for me because it may be the last film I sneaked into as a teenager. I remember seeing it and
being so happy that other people were having as much fun as I was having. It’s
crazy, it’s crass, it’s violent, it’s offense, it’s truly unfiltered Michael
Bay madness.
This brings us to Bad
Boys for Life which finds our boys a good deal older and they are starting
to grow up. Lawrence and Smith are still as funny as ever but their history of
violence is catching up with them and now Smith is being targeted by someone
from his past and it puts those he cares about in the cross hairs. The action
isn’t as crazy and the comedy isn’t as outlandish as 2 but it’s still hilarious
and action packed. The most surprising thing about this is that the dramatic
moments really land. Lawrence and Smith bring their A game here.
The Gentlemen - Guy Ritchie is at his best when making crime
movies like Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Rocknrolla (he also made a movie called Swept Away and Revolver but no one really talks about those).
For more than a decade Ritchie has been making big budget
movies like Sherlock Holmes and the
sequel, Aladdin, King Arthur and The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. It’s been 12 years since Rocknrolla
and Ritchie is back with another violent comedy about the criminal
underworld.
Matthew McConaughey is a weed dealer in London who maintains
a criminal empire thanks to his right hand man Charlie Hunnam and wife Michelle
Dockery. After years on top he decides he wants out but rival criminal
organizations and a sleazy reporter played by Hugh Grant make things difficult.
It’s not as great as some of his earlier films but overall
it’s a very funny and twisty crime comedy with terrific performances, especially from
Grant and Colin Farrell as a boxing coach who gets involuntarily pulled into
the world of gangs, drugs and guns.
Rewatched:
If I like a movie, chances are I’ll watch it a lot. I have
no idea how many times I’ve seen some of these.
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping - one of the best, funniest
movies
Pokemon Detective Pikachu - fun, creature filled mystery
The Departed - appropriately popular cops and crooks drama
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - best NJ movie ever
Ratatouille - this movie makes me so hungry
Set it Up - funny and charming, Kristen and I love it
Bad Boys - not as action packed as the rest but still damn
funny
Bad Boys 2 - seriously one of the craziest movies ever
Airheads - The Lone Rangers were the greatest 90’s band
A Knight’s Tale - the movie that showed me the beauty of
anachronistic music
Sky High - Disney made the best X-Men movie years before buying
Fox
The Accountant - as cool as it is ridiculous, one of Affleck's best
First time watching:
Some movies I just haven’t gotten around to watching until now.
Some movies have only just been made available on streaming.
Anastasia - Kristen and her siblings love this movie. It was fun watching the Tomasicchio’s sing along to the
music. I was unfamiliar with the true story and history of Anastasia (spoiler alert, it’s
sad) but it sure is interesting. This may be about Rasputin and a talking bat
friend trying to kill a young woman but it's a very fun, heartwarming and family
friendly adventure.
Alita: Battle Angel - James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez join
forces for a fun, expensive looking, sci-fi thriller starring Rosa Salazar as a
kick ass robot in a future world. The plot shares similarities with other
movies about cyborgs who learn to think for themselves (think Robocop,
Terminator and all of their subordinates) so the story is nothing new. The
action, however, is very cool. There are all sorts of killer robots with
different abilities and it includes a very violent version of roller derby where
cyborgs annihilate one another for entertainment. It looked great on the small screen and I wish I saw this
in theaters.
10 Minutes Gone - if you scroll through what's available on streaming or
check what’s new in the Redbox you may see Bruce Willis’ face a lot. I don’t
quite know why he keeps taking small roles in crappy direct to video action
movies and I don’t know why I keep watching them. This one has Michael Chiklis
as a thief in a robbery gone wrong trying to figure who set him up and why. I recently watched the entirety of The Shield and like Chiklis but he hardly makes this movie worth watching. Willis plays the man who hired him and, according to
IMDb trivia, shot all of his scenes in the hotel where he was staying. So you
can imagine the effort be gives to his 5 minutes of screen time.
Killers Anonymous - Found on Hulu this thriller looks as if it
stars Jessica Alba and Gary Oldman but they are hardly in it at all. A group of
killers (some assassins, some seemingly ordinary people) meet to discuss murders they’ve committed and how they feel about it. That
premise actually sounded interesting to me but then a lot of plot twists are
tossed in and things quickly begin to make no sense at all. It’s a frustrating mess of
a movie that isn’t trying to be anything special and yet thinks it’s something special all
at the same time.
Movies I own but
haven’t watched until now:
As a collector of physical media, I accrue movies faster
than I watch them. People often get rid
of their DVD’s, VHS tapes and, in one case, Laser Discs in bulk and I’ll take
it all (until I run out of space in my basement). This year I’m going to try
and watch a bunch of the movies that I’ve owned for a while and haven’t yet
watched. In January there was a special
focus on the action movies that have been
stacking up.
Action Jackson - Carl Weathers was cool in Mandalorian, but
he’s always been cool
Riot - Sugar Ray Leonard costars in an action movie about a
riot on Christmas
Fifty/Fifty - Robocop and the pilot from Airplane bicker and
shoot guns
Firewalker - Chuck Norris wanted to make an Indiana Jones movie
Beyond Justice - Rutger Hauer takes his time orchestrating a
rescue mission
Bloodfist V: Human Target - underrated martial artist Steve
James’ final movie
Bail Out - Hasselhoff and Linda Blair star in a mediocre action
movie
Medicine Man - Sean Connery in a boring movie from the director
of Die Hard
Excessive Force II: Force on Force - a forgettable sequel to a
forgotten movie.
New releases
watched on streaming:
New releases that go straight to streaming used to be and
indicator that the movie is bad (like the movie I watched this month) but then
you have things like The Irishman.
Bulletproof 2 - besides ‘don’t watch’ I don’t know what else to
say about this. The original is an action movie with Daman Wayans and Adam
Sandler and is a bad movie that I watched so much as a kid. 20+ years later they’ve
been replaced by two recognizable but lesser known actors in this pointless
sequel that, much like the original, contains lots of juvenile comedy and bloody
violence.
What I read:
As my mom often reminds me, I used to read a lot. After
watching 517 movies in 2019 I felt it was time to get back into reading. I’ll
still watch TV and movies and play video games (don’t worry about that!) but
I’ll be cutting back on watching anything during my commute in and out of the
city. Instead of holding a phone or Ipad inches from my face, most likely
damaging my eyes, I’ll be reading a book!
Alien 3
I was given this months ago when a friend of mine was doing
a deep dive into the Alien universe. When he gave it to me I was in the middle
of my 2019 continuous movie watch and did not get around to it. When 2020
rolled around I decided it would be the first book I read this year.
The backstory to Alien 3 is more interesting than the movie
itself. The trivia behind the making of his movie tells quite the tale of
disagreements and difficulties so, long story short - the novelization I read
does not match the finished film. The story finds Alien and Aliens survivor
Ripley in an escape pod, still floating in space after the hell she experienced
in Aliens. A malfunction, caused by a surviving alien, damages her escape pod
which makes an emergency landing on a nearby planet killing everyone in the pod except her.
The planet she lands on is actually a prison planet owned by the corporation that sent her on her two previous missions. It's inhabited by about 25 prisoners, a couple guards and a doctor. The prisoners
are mostly docile due to having found religion which is good since there are so
few guards and they are unarmed. The prison is an abandoned mining facility and when
the alien does strike, about 100 pages in to a 214 page book, it navigates the
mining tunnels which are confusing and easy to get lost in.
So much time is dedicated to two things - making it clear that the tunnels are confusing and making it
clear that the prison isn’t all that bad a place for those residing there. This
is mildly interesting but more attention should have been paid to the actual
creature. It’s not without its thrills and
scares and while I'm interested in watching the movie again, I’m more curious about
reading other versions of the screenplay. The most famous version is by Willaim
Gibson whose screenplay was recently turned into a comic book and apparently
it’s quite a different take and would have made for a very different movie.
Grown Ups 3
I’m counting this because I want to talk about it. Tom
Scharpling, writer and producer for TV shows like What We Do in the Shadows, Difficult People, Nathan for You
and Monk, wrote a screenplay for Grown Ups 3 just for the fun of it. The story
has Adam Sandler and most of the actors you associate with Adam Sandler play
themselves during the production of Grown Ups 3. They are all older now and
their egos are getting in the way of having fun. Sandler, frustrated by this,
rents a lake house where they continue bickering until a masked killer arrives.
Scharpling clearly has an appreciation for Sandler, his
famous friends, and the movies they make. He gets their voices spot on and the
violence hits hard and fast. It is a very silly idea which has been getting some positive attention ever since Scharpling shared the script early this year. It would be so cool if Sandler helped this get made and between the newfound attention following Uncut Gems and a new deal with Netflix he can pretty much do whatever he wants!
Driven
Being a big fan of the movie Drive I was excited to learn of a sequel to the book it was based on. I should probably read the first book but having seen
the movie many times and after reading this it seems to me that the creators of
the film stayed pretty true to the world the writer creates, the tone he sets
and the voice his characters have.
After hired goons kill his girlfriend the nameless
protagonist only known to the reader as Driver deals with waves of
assorted heavies and hitmen who seem to always be on his tail no matter how far
he runs. While on the run he stays in contact with an ex-soldier who does some
digging to find out who and why people are trying to kill him.
This is an exciting story but it’s all about the dialogue.
Characters say a lot, Driver says very little and it all takes place in a world
where crooks, cops and everyone in between speak in a very highfalutin manner
out of an old detective story and it mixes w
ell with the realism and ugliness of the world
it all takes place in.
The Teeth of the Tiger
My brother Jake is a big Tom Clancy fan and when I asked him
for a recommendation he told me I should start with this one.
It’s a dense, detailed thriller where every character you meet is fleshed
out and it's longer than everything I’ve read in January put together. I’m mostly familiar with Tom Clancy because of the Jack Ryan movies and TV
show. This book is about the second generation of Ryan’s - his son and his
nephews - joining a covert team called The Campus.
The Campus operates in the shadows of the better known
government agencies like the CIA and NSA. Jack Ryan Jr. talks his way into a
desk job at The Campus and is placed in the accounting department to oversee
money transactions worldwide from shady individuals. Meanwhile the nephews, a
marine and an FBI agent, are recruited after performing well in their
respective fields and are trained to carry out an assassination, which makes
each of them a little uneasy.
The antagonists are a terrorist organization utilizing their
criminal connections to sneak into America to carry out an attack. I’m at about
the midpoint now and the attack on America is incredibly disturbing.
The writing really puts you in the mind of each character
and you spend a few paragraphs with one before jumping to another. I found the
structure a bit hard to follow and so much time is dedicated to building up to
something but many characters, and the reader, are kept in the dark which gets
frustrating after hundreds of pages.
It still mostly an exciting read and I’m curious about
other Clancy novels.
Y: The Last Man
I started reading this comic after years of people telling
me it’s really good. The premise is that one day every male, human and animal,
on the planet dies. Except one man and his pet monkey. While trying to figure
out why he and his pet are the only survivors he encounters lots of dangerous
people. I’ve only just finished the 2nd issue so I'm not sure where this is all
going but I like it!
TV shows:
Finished the first season of Killing Eve and started watching Carnival Row and The Witcher.
Killing Eve is twisty, violent fun and I look forward to watching season 2. I'm only a couple episodes into the fantasy/period piece Carnival Row but I like it a lot and I still have to finish the first episode of the The Witcher but it's pretty cool.
Live performances:
Umphree’s McGee:
Outside of Furthur and moe. I haven’t seen many jam bands but I had heard that
Umphree’s McGee was the most metal jam band so that piqued my interest. I would still classify them as a jam band but wow they sure can rock out. I hadn’t heard much of
their stuff but that probably helped as they didn’t really play many songs
except for a Rush cover to honor Neil Pert. They mostly just jammed for 3 hours
and it was awesome.
Monster Jam: I
highly recommend seeing a monster truck show but go to an outdoors venue if at
all possible. We saw this at Prudential and it was loud and dusty but still
awesome. There were monster trucks balancing on
two wheels, flying through the air and we even saw one do a flip which was
apparently the first time that occurred in Prudential so that’s neat. They also had quad and dune buggy races. It was a very
fun show.
